I never met Rene Baterbonia. Many in Davao were proud of the championship he helped win for Davao’s regional basketball team in the 2025 Palarong Pambansa, coached by Jess Evangelio, whom I am proud of. As a longtime UAAP basketball fan, I watched Divine Adili compete against the team of my Alma Mater, the UP Fighting Maroons.

As I reflect on them, their love of sport and family, and pray for the eternal repose of their souls, I also reflect on how we all need to promote and support various team sports in the country, especially in the regions.

This is because we live in a confused age that emphasizes feelings over facts and sentiments over ideas and emphasizes obtaining immediate pleasures over long-term meaningful pursuits. We also live at a time when the concept of common good, shared ground, and collective purpose has sadly lost out to rabid individualism.

This is manifest in the need to fit oneself into ever smaller portions within a spectrum of identities. As these expressions of identity grow into narrow definitions, the differentiations grow tighter and more rigid, becoming more exclusionary. This leads many to be foxholed into silos, content to amuse themselves while the rest of the world outside this self-imposed mental border degrades.

These tendencies make society more contentious, lowering trust and often negating opportunities for meaningful collaboration to solve complex common problems and move forward.

To illustrate this, we cannot solve the challenges of flooding by mere finger-pointing at those we feel are responsible, when we ourselves condone disposing of garbage that clogs our waterways. We will all need to be responsible in our own way.

Team sports ought to bridge divides and cultivate common purpose through important values of teamwork, sacrifice, and self-discipline, which will be essential in facing the world of today and tomorrow. Team sports can help build those values. This is especially true for the next Alpha and Beta generation, who will need to build the character that can take on future challenges.

In his 1987 address to athletes participating in the World Athletics Championships in Rome, which you can find in www.laityfamilylife.va, Saint John Paul 2 exhorts the participants to imbibe the values that inspire them to sport:

“For this reason there are certain values in your life which cannot be forgotten. These values will set you on that clear track which has to be followed in order for you to reach life's ultimate goal. Primary among them is the religious meaning of human existence. Sport, as you well know, is an activity that involves more than the movement of the body; it demands the use of intelligence and the disciplining of the will. It reveals, in other words, the wonderful structure of the human person created by God as a spiritual being, a unity of body and spirit. Athletic activity can help every man and woman to recall that moment when God the Creator gave origin to the human person, the masterpiece of his creative work…… The observance of this order is the condition for success.”

As created spiritual beings, divine grace forms the values that guide our intelligence and freedom to pursue virtue and the common good. Team sports can teach us to practice these values that inform the skill, discipline, and emotional maturity we need to work together and overcome shared challenges and achieve common goals. Without these values, the project of a resilient local community, a competitive business, a robust supply chain, and a sustainable, growing economy is more difficult to achieve.